This is the second time that my life has fallen apart on the birthday of someone I cared about. First, it was Lauren Jauregui. Now it's Sydney Carvahall.
I don't even know where to begin. The most vivid memory I have is sitting in my car, trying and failing to breathe. You think it'd be easy. I mean, I kind of have to retain my ability to breathe, especially with the goddamn virus fifteen minutes from where I live.
But I couldn't. I was sitting there, outside the last college class I'll attend this year, and I couldn't breathe. My chest was impossibly tight, like there was a hand on my sternum, and a thousand electric fingers were wrapped around the thin bone and slipping between my ribs. My heart was racing, my stomach was turning, and I couldn't calm down. Not even "Cornelia Street" could calm me. Not even "Easy" could calm me.
All I could think was that the virus didn't feel like a sickness. Sickness is when your soul becomes foreign to you, when your body turns against you, so you're a prisoner inside a creature that does nothing you want it to.
No, this was a storm. The part right before it, where the sky gets dark and greenish, and you can see the clouds, ragged and mottled, like the plumage of a peregrine falcon. Where the air smells too heavy, and you can feel it closing in around your skull, pushing you, compressing you, until you're nothing but a small pile of flesh and blood in the roiling winds and pounding hail of Earth's wrath.
Except, it wasn't a falcon sky. The sky was a bright gray, the type you'd expect to see in mid-March where I live, where the grass is a little too green and your shadow is a little too defined. It didn't feel right.
I was restrained by my seat belt as a deep slow panic overtook me, but I knew that if I took it off and exited the car, the pressure would still be there.
Anyway, I'm a fan of in media res. So let's skip to the beginning.
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Six AM. The first thing I see is my internet friend texting me her usual variation of "wait, I was doing this activity, come back!" We live on opposite sides of the world, and I can't help but think it's like this movie hidden somewhere underneath piles of dust in my basement, called Ladyhawke. The plot is, there's this couple, and one of them is a werewolf. The other is a werehawk. The catch is, the wolf turns at night, and the hawk turns at day. So the couple can only see each other at twilight.
It's a little bit different for us, since my internet friend doesn't sleep and I've been cutting into my nights for her. But like the movie, it seems like the entire world is hell-bent on tearing us apart.
Anyway, she liked a fan art I made (see header). I don't do fan art; I write books and music, and do schoolwork. But the stress of an entire yearbook due in three days, a test I didn't understand, and a talent show performance rendered me incapable of doing anything. So I transformed a doodle of my friend's main character into digital art and sent it to her for her birthday. She posted it on her account, and then I pretended to be shocked when the author noticed me. You know, because my friend totally isn't the author.
I gave myself a good five minutes to buzz with excitement over the fact that I was in cahoots with an author whose characters I really like, and then I started on my homework.
You see, I had to bring a picture of my favorite place to class. Problem is, my favorite place isn't a real place. My absolute favorite place is in my mind (preferably with a mirror on hand). I'm my own best friend and primary love interest. I can stare at myself for hours, complementing every feature and wishing there were another one of me so I could date him. I love talking to myself in my head, because I have so many inside jokes with myself. I know me better than anyone, and I'm always there to support myself.
